Osman Samiuddin captures the jazba of the men who played for Pakistan, celebrates their headiest moments and many upheavals, and brings to life some of their most famous—and infamous—contests, tours and moments.Ambitious, spirited and often heartbreaking, 'The Unquiet Ones' is a comprehensive portrait of not just a Pakistani sport, but a national majboori, a compulsion whose outcome can surprise and shock, and can become the barometer of everyday life in Pakistan, tailing its ups and downs, its moods and character.

    China is Pakistan's great economic hope and its most trusted military partner; Pakistan is the battleground for China's encounters with Islamic militancy and the heart of its efforts to counter-balance the emerging US-India partnership. For decades, each country has been the other's only 'all-weather' friend. Yet the relationship is still little understood. The wildest claims about it are widely believed, while many of its most dramatic developments are hid- den from the public eye. This book sets out the recent history of Sino-Pakistani ties and their ramifications for the West, for India, for Afghanistan, and for Asia as a whole. It tells the stories behind some of its most sensitive aspects, including Beijing's support for Pakistan's nuclear program, China's dealings with the Taliban, and the Chinese military's planning for crises in Pakistan. It describes a relationship increasingly shaped by Pakistan's internal strife, and the dilemmas China faces between the need for regional stability and the imperative for strategic competition with India and the USA.

    Its cricket team evolved in the chaotic aftermath. Initially unrecognised, underfunded and weak, Pakistan's team grew to become a major force in world cricket. Since the early days of the Raj, cricket has been entwined with national identity and Pakistan's successes helped to define its status in the world. Defiant in defence, irresistible in attack, players such as A.H.Kardar, Fazal Mahmood, Wasim Akram and Imran Khan awed their contemporaries and inspired their successors. The story of Pakistan cricket is filled with triumph and tragedy. In recent years, it has been threatened by the same problems affecting Pakistan itself: fallout from the 'war on terror', sectarian violence, corruption, crises in health and education, and a shortage of effective leaders. For twenty years, Pakistan cricket has been stained by the scandalous behaviour of the players involved in match-fixing. Since 2009, the fear of violence has driven Pakistan's international cricket into exile. No one knows when it will return home. But Peter Oborne's narrative is also full of hope. For all its troubles, cricket gives all Pakistanis a chance to excel and express themselves, a sense of identity and a cause for pride in their country. Packed with first-hand recollections, and digging deep into political, social and cultural history, Wounded Tiger is a major study of sport and nationhood.

    The military establishment has locked the country in an enduring rivalry with India, with the primary aim of wresting Kashmir from it. To that end, Pakistan initiated three wars over Kashmir-in 1947, 1965, and 1999-and failed to win any of them. Today, the army continues to prosecute this dangerous policy by employing non-state actors under the security of its ever-expanding nuclear umbrella. It has sustained a proxy war in Kashmir since 1989 using Islamist militants, as well as supporting non-Islamist insurgencies throughout India and a country-wide Islamist terror campaign that have brought the two countries to the brink of war on several occasions. In addition to these territorial revisionist goals, the Pakistani army has committed itself to resisting India's slow but inevitable rise on the global stage.Despite Pakistan's efforts to coerce India, it has achieved only modest successes at best. Even though India vivisected Pakistan in 1971, Pakistan continues to see itself as India's equal and demands the world do the same. The dangerous methods that the army uses to enforce this self-perception have brought international opprobrium upon Pakistan and its army. And in recent years, their erstwhile proxies have turned their guns on the Pakistani state itself.Why does the army persist in pursuing these revisionist policies that have come to imperil the very viability of the state itself, from which the army feeds? In Fighting to the End, C. Christine Fair argues that the answer lies, at least partially, in the strategic culture of the army. Through an unprecedented analysis of decades' worth of the army's own defense publications, she concludes that from the army's distorted view of history, it is victorious as long as it can resist India's purported drive for regional hegemony as well as the territorial status quo. Simply put, acquiescence means defeat. Fighting to the End convincingly shows that because the army is unlikely to abandon these preferences, Pakistan will remain a destabilizing force in world politics for the foreseeable future.

    It argues that Pakistan was not a simply a vague idea that serendipitously emerged as a nation-state, but was popularly imagined as a sovereign Islamic State, a new Medina, as some called it. In this regard, it was envisaged as the harbinger of Islam's renewal and rise in the twentieth century, the new leader and protector of the global community of Muslims, and a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate. The book also specifically foregrounds the critical role played by Deobandi ulama in articulating this imagined national community with an awareness of Pakistan's global historical significance.

    The Making of Exile hopes to redress this, by turning a spotlight on the specific narratives of the Sindhi Hindu community. Post-Partition, Sindh was relatively free of the inter-communal violence witnessed in Punjab, Bengal and other parts of north India. Consequently, in the first few months of Pakistan's early life, Sindhi Hindus did not migrate and remained the most significant minority in West Pakistan. Starting with the announcement of the Partition of India, The Making of Exile firmly traces the experiences of the community - that went from being a small but powerful minority to becoming the target of communal discrimination, practiced by both the state as well as sections of Pakistani society. This climate of communal antipathy threw into sharp relief the help and sympathy extended to Sindhi Hindus by other Pakistani Muslims, both Sindhi and muhajir. Finally, it was when they became victims of the Karachi pogrom of January 1948 that Sindhi Hindus felt compelled to migrate to India.The second segment of the book examines the resettlement of the community in India - their first brush with squalid refugee camps, their struggle to make sense of rapidly changing governmental policies and the spirit of determination and enterprise with which they rehabilitated themselves in their new homeland. Yet, not all Sindhi Hindus chose to migrate and the specific challenges of those who stayed on in Sindh, as well as the difficulties faced by Sindhi Muslims after the formation of Pakistan, have been sensitively documented in the final chapters. Weaving in a variety of narratives - diary entries and memoirs, press reportage, letters to editors and, advertisements, legends and poetry, dozens of interviews and a wealth of academic literature - Nandita Bhavnani's The Making of Exile is one of the most comprehensive and multifaceted studies of the Sindhi experience of Partition.

    After rallying non-Urdu speaking leaders around him, Jinnah imposed a unitary definition of the new nation state that obliterated linguistic diversity. This centralisation - 'justified' by the Indian threat - fostered centrifugal forces that resulted in Bengali secessionism in 1971 and Baloch, as well as Mohajir, separatisms today. Concentration of power in the hands of the establishment remained the norm, and while authoritarianism peaked under military rule, democracy failed to usher in reform, and the rule of law remained fragile at best under Zulfikar Bhutto and later Nawaz Sharif. While Jinnah and Ayub Khan regarded religion as a cultural marker, since their time the Islamists have gradually prevailed. They benefited from the support of General Zia, while others, including sectarian groups, cashed in on their struggle against the establishment to woo the disenfranchised. Today, Pakistan faces existential challenges ranging from ethnic strife to Islamism, two sources of instability which hark back to elite domination. But the resilience of the country and its people, the resolve of the judiciary and hints of reform in the army may open a new and more stable chapter in its history.

    The novel grapples with the message that drone attacks give rise to anger, revenge and hate. And anything that fuels any of these emotions cannot really tackle terrorism. This novel also discusses the contributing factors to the recent surge in terrorism which continue to be illiteracy, joblessness and oppressive and corrupt regimes. Bullets and Train is set in the backdrop of Afghan War. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda steal a tactical nuclear bomb and agencies of four countries have to work together to track it before it is used in a terrorist plot. A US soldier is kidnaped by the Taliban from Afghanistan and held captive in Pakistan. In the meanwhile a train is hijacked in Singapore as part of a mega-terrorist plot. ---------------------------********************--------------------------- Review: Pros: 1) Excellent Pace; 2) Wonderful Story; and 3) Told from a perspective based on ground realities Cons: 1) English; and 2) English

    Novel's theme is based on the international espionage net that covers South Asian and Middle Eastern region. Caught in this net is the elected Government of Pakistan which is accused by the opposition of having come in power via fraudulent elections. The plot is centered upon the US preparations for attack on the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant/Syria and its involvement in Pakistani politics.It will be available for free download from 11 to 13 Oct 2014 on Amazon Kindle.

    It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, landand bhatta-protection money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a Pakistan in miniature, has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer's book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in thecity's permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi's polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence manageable for its populations. Whether such ordered disorder is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachiworks despite-and sometimes through-violence.

    Poignantly written, and based on real events and interviews, what emerges is the story of lives between cultures, of families reconciling customs and traditions away from their ancestral roots, and of the tensions this necessarily creates. We hear from the young bride from Bangladesh, married to a stranger, who comes to England to navigate life with a man she cannot love; from an Indian father who struggles to come to terms with his son’s mental illness and hides it from people he knows; about how a mother and daughter’s relationship was shattered in the clash over the Pakistani traditions her daughter chooses not to follow. Each narrative describes a journey that is both literal and deeply emotional, exploring the hold an inherited culture can have on the decisions and choices we make. At times heart-breaking, at times inspirational, In Spite of Oceans brings to life the pull of the past and the push of the future, and the evolving nature of what we understand as home.

    This novel explores the deep rooted corruption in the political, journalist and judicial community in a developing country.

    Beset by assassinations, coups, ethnic strife, and the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has found itself too often contending with religious extremism and military authoritarianism. Now, in a probing biography of her native land amid the throes of global change, Ayesha Jalal provides an insider's assessment of how this nuclear-armed Muslim nation evolved as it did and explains why its dilemmas weigh so heavily on prospects for peace in the region.Attentive to Pakistan's external relations as well as its internal dynamics, Jalal shows how the vexed relationship with the United States, border disputes with Afghanistan in the west, and the conflict with India over Kashmir in the east have played into the hands of the generals who purchased security at the cost of strong democratic institutions. Combined with domestic ethnic and regional rivalries, such pressures have created a siege mentality that encourages military domination and militant extremism.Since 9/11, the country has been widely portrayed as a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism. Assessing the threats posed by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban as American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Jalal contends that the battle for Pakistan's soul is far from over. Her definitive biography reveals how pluralism and democracy continue to struggle for a place in this Muslim homeland, where they are so essential to its future.

    The protagonists are in their late teens whose chance meeting turns into love at first sight. Amidst the inter-religious riots and clashes their love blossoms, but is threatened when it becomes the focal point of these tensions.

    military’s post-9/11 incursion In autumn 2001, U.S. and NATO troops were deployed to Afghanistan to unseat the Taliban rulers, repressive Islamic fundamentalists who had lent active support to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda jihadists. The NATO forces defeated and dismantled the Taliban government, scattering its remnants across the country. But despite a more than decade-long attempt to eradicate them, the Taliban endured—regrouping and reestablishing themselves as a significant insurgent movement. Gradually they have regained control of large portions of Afghanistan even as U.S. troops are preparing to depart from the region.   In his authoritative and highly readable account, author Hassan Abbas examines how the Taliban not only survived but adapted to their situation in order to regain power and political advantage. Abbas traces the roots of religious extremism in the area and analyzes the Taliban’s support base within Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In addition, he explores the roles that Western policies and military decision making— not to mention corruption and incompetence in Kabul—have played in enabling the Taliban’s resurgence.

    You're invited to approach this as a handbook for implementing his life-giving ideas.Written by a foremost authority on the subject, this is a tribute to Dr. Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) by ten sovereign states: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are members of the Economic Cooperation Organization, whose Cultural Institute (ECI) has published this book jointly with Iqbal Academy Pakistan.Join us now as Iqbal's legacy continues to unfold through the lives of us all.

    Illicit lovers playing with Koranic numerology; an enslaved man turned into a beast; a young woman rejecting her father's faith; theologically inclined brothers caught in a dragnet; a resentful poet's cynical humanitarianism. Sensual and surrealist, the stories in Falsipedies and Fibsiennes unsettle and surprise, but with tenderness.

    Tip No. 1: Believe it or not a camping trip is the best place to start, ESPECIALLY IF IT HAS:Changez, 12 (Tip No. 2: Think constable in the lunatic police) Timmy, 9 (Tip No. 3: Think capuchin-monkey brained snotasaurus) A mud volcano (Tip No. 4: Yes, it can erupt!) A snippy sparrow (Tip No. 5: Small is BIG) Saw-toothed crocs (Tip No. 6: The animals, not the shoes) The last Ursus thibetanus gedrosianus(Tip No. 7: Think large, furry and walking towards you!) A herd of hyper-herbivorous Baluchitheria (Tip No. 8: Don't think... RUN!) One poetic Markhor (Tip No. 9: Yup, get the earplugs) A Protoliterodragon (Tip No. 10: It may go from bad to verse! ) Vegetarian Velociraptors (Tip No. 11: Be glad you are not green) And as always...Assorted pesky humans, including angry soldiers and heartless rogues (Tip No. 12: Think the most dangerous animal on the planet) Got the idea? Here's a story that tells you what on earth is really happening... If you are a clever Smartosapiens Survival Tips for Lunatics is the mad, mad handbook for you to make sense of the world and where it is going, besides round and round!

    First, they focus on the vexed issue of the violence which accompanied the partition of the subcontinent. The contributions assess the range of motives and circumstances which culminated in themass killings, drawing on fresh sources, such as Police First Information Reports. There are studies of local level incidences of violence and and the debates surrounding the role of the Sikh community in the massacres in the East Punjab.Secondly, the collection sheds light on the politics of the transfer of power. It brings fresh insights to the roles of Wavell and Mountbatten and traces the long term impact of the Kashmir issue. There is also a pioneering study of the role of the last Governor of the Punjab. Finally, the volumeaddresses concerns of the 'New History' of Partition, which has its emphasis on subaltern groups and the lived experience of resettlement. The work examines the ways in which Christians living in the West Punjab were affected by partition and how migrants to Delhi attempted to maintain theiridentity through dietary preferences.

    The novel takes the reader through the village life in the 1990s in the mountains of Pakistan.

    This volume gathers essays from scholars in a variety of fields that explore substantial new ground in Partition research, looking into such under-studied areas as art, literature, migration, and, crucially, notions of “foreignness” and “belonging,” among many others. It will be required reading for any scholars of the recent history, politics, and culture of the subcontinent.

    It demonstrates that Eurasia is home to a dominant tradition of arbitrary rule mediated through military, civil and ecclesiastical servants and a marginal tradition of representative and responsible government through autonomous institutions. The former tradition finds expression in hierarchically organized and ideologically legitimated continental bureaucratic states while the latter manifests itself in the state of laws. In recent times, the marginal tradition has gained in popularity and has led to continental bureaucratic states attempting to introduce democratic and constitutional reforms. These attempts have rarely altered the actual manner in which power is exercised by the state and its elites given the deeper and historically rooted experience of arbitrary rule. Far from being remote, the arbitrary culture of power that emerged in many parts of the world continues to shape the fortunes of states. To ignore this culture of power and the historical circumstances that have shaped it comes at a high price, as indicated by the ongoing democratic recession and erosion of liberal norms within states that are democracies.

    It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at once flexible and constrained--indeed, itis a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and reformation are worked out.At this discursive site are many metonyms for Islam: the veiled or "pious" Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question "How do we free ourselves from freedom?" Again and again, freedom is imagined as Western, modern, imperial--a dark imposition of Enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his or her own enslavement is imagined as freedom's other.At Freedom's Limit is an intervention into current debates regarding religion, secularism, and Islam and provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. It shows that, even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters.This book includes extended readings of jihadist proclamations; postcolonial law; responses to law from minorities in Muslim-majority societies; Islamophobic films; the novels of Leila Aboulela, Mohammed Hanif, and Nadeem Aslam; and the paintings of Komail Aijazuddin.

    Tens of people have died each year in an undeclared war that has no clear victors. Violence escalated this year leading to death tolls that even the city’s battle-weary residents found hard to believe. In their attempts to gain control over land – a prized commodity in a city that has grown dramatically to become Pakistan’s financial capital -- political parties and their criminal wings have waged war against each other using propaganda, threats, torture and weapons. Hundreds have been killed in Karachi over the past few years on the basis of their political affiliation, ethnicity, religious background or profession. No Team of Angels explores the reasons behind the killings and provides a background of the different groups that seek to dominate Karachi. Saba Imtiaz reports from the streets of Karachi, telling the stories of those leading the feuding groups as well as those who suffer at their hands. No Team of Angels explores their motives and how the fight for land has left a weak government, a hapless police force and a puzzled judiciary wondering how to bring an end to the bloody war.

    The fifteen-year-old Pakistani girl needed to die, Taliban leaders reasoned, because she spoke out against the group's policies, which had included the suppression of girls' education in Malala's home region of Swat Valley. The assassin was nearly successful, but Malala survived the shooting and became an even stronger voice for children's rights. "Weakness, fear, and hopelessness died," Malala said about that fateful day. "Strength, power, and courage was born." This book tells the story of this Nobel Peace Prize runner-up, who hasinspired leaders to take real action on behalf of students in Pakistanand around the world. Moreover, the book shines a light on the troubles that Pakistani girls face, such as forced marriage and physical abuse, in addition to their obstacles in education.

    The Ahmadis believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadiyan (1835 1908) was a prophet (in a nuanced understanding of this term) and promised messiah. This led to the group s condemnation as infidels during the colonial period, setting in course a painful history of religious exclusion.Part I of this volume traces the development of the anti-Ahmadi movement from its origin in Punjab province, where an agitation movement was launched calling upon the central government to declare the Ahmadis officially non-Muslim. After the movement intensified, leading to proclamation of martial law in Lahore in 1953, the Punjab government held a court of inquiry, which released its report in 1954. The proceedings of the Munir-Kiyani inquiry commission has now become available to scholars, and is a key focus of analysis. Part II focuses on the developments in Pakistan s politics that created a discursive space where legislative measures against the Ahmadis could be deliberated and adopted by the national assembly, and argues Pakistan s first general elections in 1970 reflected the entrenchment of religious leaders in Pakistan s power politics. The national assembly s 1974 session saw Ahmadis unanimously declared as non-Muslims; the records of this session s debates are extensively reviewed in this book.A truly path-breaking study, this work goes beyond merely chronicling the details of anti-Ahmadi violence and the legal and administrative measures adopted against them, to address wider issues of the politics of Islam in postcolonial Muslim nation-states and their disputative engagements with the ideas of modernity and citizenship."

    A key ally in the global war on terror, it is also the country in which Osama bin Laden was finally found and killed—and the one that has borne the brunt of much of the ongoing conflict’s collateral damage. Despite its prominence on the front lines and on the front pages, Pakistan has been depicted by Western observers simplistically in terms of its corruption, its fundamentalist Islamic beliefs, and its propensity for violence. Dispatches from Pakistan, in contrast, reveals the complexities, the challenges, and the joys of daily life in the country, from the poetry of Gilgit to the graffiti of Gwadar, from an army barrack in Punjab to the urban politics of Karachi.This timely book brings together journalists, activists, academics, and artists to provide a rich, in-depth, and intriguing portrait of contemporary Pakistani society. Straddling a variety of boundaries—geographic, linguistic, and narrative—Dispatches from Pakistan is a vital attempt to speak for the multitude of Pakistanis who, in the face of seemingly unimaginable hardships, from drone strikes to crushing poverty, remain defiantly optimistic about their future. While engaging in conversations on issues that make the headlines in the West, the contributors also introduce less familiar dimensions of Pakistani life, highlighting the voices of urban poets, rural laborers, industrial workers, and religious-feminist activists—and recovering Pakistani society’s inquilabi (revolutionary) undercurrents and its hopeful overtones.Contributors: Mahvish Ahmad; Nosheen Ali, U of California, Berkeley; Shafqat Hussain, Trinity College; Humeira Iqtidar, King’s College London; Amina Jamal, Ryerson U; Hafeez Jamali, U of Texas at Austin; Iqbak Khattak; Zahra Malkani; Raza Mir; Hammad Nasar; Junaid Rana, U of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; Maliha Safri, Drew U; Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Lahore U of Management Sciences; Ayesha Siddiqa; Sultan-i-Rome, Government Jahanzeb Postgraduate College, Swat, Pakistan; Saadia Toor, Staten Island College.